Point of View Inc.
Point of View (nicknamed "POV") is an American video game developer founded on 1996 in Irvine, California and dissolved in 2010. The only Sonic game Point of View worked on is the cancelled Sega Saturn game, Sonic X-treme. They were brought by technical director Robert Morgan two months before the representatives from Sega of Japan came over to check on the game's progress, and their part was to port the game from the PC to the Saturn, after Chris Senn and Ofer Alon failed with 3-4 FPS with only 4 colors and crashes. POV got the same results after porting an older version of the game (version 040). Some time after this, Ofer Alon was taken off the project. According to Senn, STI management viewed Alon as a maverick who did not follow company politics and did little to direct the other programmers. POV became the main developers, and to demonstrate to Ofer and Senn the reason for the drastic action, Robert Morgan showed them a demo created by Point of View. Senn recalled, "They showed us the Sonic sprite we were already using floating in the upper-right of the screen, a checkerboard ground, a rotating shaded polygonal shape floating in the air and maybe a ring sprite animating. For all that we had created, to throw all that away for such nonsense. Amazing." After seeing this, Alon and Senn separated from POV & continued developing Sonic X-treme as a PC game. POV was using assets from an older version of Senn and Alon's engine and editor, and made their own demo of Sonic X-treme playable with the ability to lose rings, defeat enemies and getting hurt by them. POV couldn't replicate the fisheye lens camera of Sonic X-treme in their own build. The last time this demo was developed was at 14 July, 1996. They also continued their port of the older version of Chris Senn and Ofer Alon's engine to the Saturn, this time with only two frames of animation for each sprite, not only 4 colors and enough FPS to make the game to run as fast as the PC version. After seeing the broken efforts of POV to port v40 to the Sega Saturn, disappointed, Sega Of Japan was so impressed by the boss engine that they requested the entire game be made on that instead, as "Project Condor", scrapping POV, Chris Senn and Ofer Alon's work all together. In November 2014, Point of View's stuff from 1996-1997 was found by ASSEMbler Games member "Jollyroger", and included prototypes for various games, including Playstation tech demos called "Command and Conquer: Commando" and "Sony IMSA v1.15" and most notably, all of POV's work on Sonic X-treme. They include the Sega Saturn version of v40 as seen above, a PC version of v40 that supports different resolutions and has all frames of animation for each sprite, an even earlier prototype for the PC called version 037 or v37, that doesn't have fisheye and has the "World Rotation" gameplay mechanic, the level editors used by Chris Senn and Ofer Alon and POV's own build of the game. Category:Video game companies